Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?
Simone the Beauvoir, The Second Sex
She takes just like a woman (yes she does)
She makes love just like a woman (yes she does)
And she aches just like a woman…
Bob Dylan
voice stilled, body mute, always foreign to the social
order…voice without body, body without voice, silent
anguish choking on the rhythms of words, without
sounds, without images, outside time, outside knowledge.
Julia Kristeva, On Chinese Women
…images and symbols for the woman cannot be
separated from images and symbols of the woman.
Jacques Lacan
In the 37 years that have passed since Simone de Beauvoir produced her monumental study of women´s estate, feminist theorists, scholars, artists, writers, and poets, have continued to explore the consequences of that Otherness that de Beauvoir saw as constitutive of femininity within patriarchy. And as variable, contingent, and mutable as the concepts of femininity and masculinity may be - a function of discourse and not of biology-the former is inevitably positioned as Other, the latter invariably as the One. Thus, whether feminine Otherness is celebrated and valorized, or perceived as a structure of oppression and subjugation, its prevalence as an apparently universal social and cultural given has not been disputed.
De Beauvoir´s discussion of the stakes and consequences that attend the construction of woman as Other has since been reformulated through an analysis of the concept of sexual difference. Such an investigation focuses on how this difference comes into being, and how it is put into play. In addition it heightens awareness of the radical alienation of women from language and indeed, from all the symbolic systems in which a culture´s reality is represented. For as the English rendering of the de Beauvoir quote tellingly demonstrates, language, in the very act of specifying a condition of femininity, asserts the primacy of the masculine term. If the “alien point of view” that women have historically accepted, is that of the man´s, and if language and image are already marked by the view, we must ask ourselves how and in what terms can the Other become the One?
These are the kinds of questions that have supplemented de Beauvoir´s existentially informed discussion of feminine alterity, subjecting it to ideas taken from a variety of theoretical contexts: from Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytical theory; from structural linguistics and anthropology, from semiotics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism.
One of the consequences of the deployment of these critical methodologies is to have put in question-even more forcefully, to have radically undercut - any assumption of a stable or unproblematic content for terms and identities such as “masculine,” “feminine,” “man,” “woman.” The concept of a unitary and unified identity-the transcendental subject of Western philosophy - has itself been jettisoned; psychoanalysis having been the first and perhaps most important discipline to do so. Bob Dylan may confidently invoke those attributes conventionally descriptive of woman, (what she is like) but the impulse of most contemporary thought is to insist precisely on its non-determinacy. In the broadest sense, the influence of the ideas has been to redirect the inquiry into femininity away from the object itself (i.e., locating the “authentic” feminine) to the grounds, the stakes, the apparatuses, the mechanisms of its construction and articulation. As such, attention is focused on the production of subjectivity, and the production of meaning. Any claim to absolute knowledge, to the fixing of origins, to the authority of master narratives, to certainty, is categorically refused. The tradition of Western philosophical investigation that Nietzsche had characterized as “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being” is thereby foreclosed.(1)
At its most extreme, such an enterprise achieves a kind of epistemological closure in the assertion that there is no real outside of representation, or in its somewhat less totalizing version, no access to the real unmediated by representation. Such hypotheses cannot but derail the quest for an essential nature, of the man, the woman, the human being.
Contemporary feminist theory has been profoundly affected by the influence of these new theoretical positions. The various critiques of the sign, of representation, and of the subject that form these investigations, have obvious implications for an examination of the cultural construction of femininity through the agency of representation.
Jacques Lacan´s notorious pronouncement that woman doesn´t exist (Ła femme elle n´existe pas) is thus a logical corollary to the recognition that sexuality and desire, subjectivity and meaning are all constructed in language. And to the extent that the category woman is understood to be wholly discursive production (and within patriarchy, a differential one; a being defined by her relationship to lack), any conceptualization of the “real” woman is logically both unknowable and unspeakable.
In prefacing a discussion of the photographic work of Francesca Woodman with a necessarily cursory invocation of certain theoretical issues that currently inform feminist theory, I am bowing to the need to provide a frame of reference, a conceptual schema, in which to consider it. Unlike contemporary artists using photography (be it appropriated or newly produced) such as Connie Hatch, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, and others who might explicitly define their work as both feminist and critical, Woodman´s work neither announces a manifestly political agenda nor a specifically feminist orientation. Nonetheless, the nature of Woodman´s photography, its thematic preoccupations, its troubling iconography, the subject/object relations it explores - all coalesce to encourage and to support a feminist reading. In emphasizing the intersections between a body of work whose subject is in fact the body, with a body of theory that renders the body problematic, I intend no hard and fast correspondences, no fixed equivalence. Rather, I am attempting a reading that provokes reciprocal echoes, parallels, and allusions between the work of theorists and the work of an individual artist whose relation to these theories, supposing it to have existed at all, is unknown.
The power of Woodman´s images, their ferocity and their beauty, does not in any case derive from their compatability with theoretical ideas. Nonetheless reference to these notions has the capacity to reveal other dimensions of the work, to offer an enriched perception of their meaning, and perhaps most important, to establish a contextual dimension that places the art of Woodman in relation to her contemporaries and her successors.
Produced from early adolescence until the time of her death, Woodman´s photography is the work of a prodigy. As such it is particularly difficult to place. Prodigies in photography are singularly rare; women prodigies virtually unheard of. The ambition, the sophistication, and the complexity of her work is significant. It does not conform to a developmental model of cultural production in which one can distinguish a passage from juvenalia to artistic maturity. By her late teens she appears to have clearly defined the parameters of her work: an assiduous inventory and exploration of the woman´s body as icon of desire. In selecting the camera as her medium. Woodman was choosing a technology that is itself inseparable from those operations of fetishism and objectification that Woodman consistently worked to dissect. (2) Thus the tension between photography´s own structural norms and limitations, and the intensity of Woodman´s efforts to make it do something else, is what provides the edge in her work.
This palpable straining against the confines of the single still image was an important component in the development of her project. It led her, first of all, to abandon the high modernist idea of a single, self-contained photograph as an end in itself. The overwhelming majority of Woodman´s photographs are serially conceived; themes and motifs circulate, are elaborated, modified, reworked. Additionally, the philosopher´s stone of art photography – the purely visual – was scrapped; many of Woodman´s photographs bear cryptic texts, shards of narrative or description. In her artist´s books such as Some Disordered Interior Geometries, the photographs are part of a larger system; they play a crucial, but by no means exclusive role. Finally, in later work such as the extraordinary and monumental blueprint diptychs and triptychs, Woodman effectively invented a new form. Projecting 35mm slides on the light sensitive paper, Woodman created images that have the grainy, tenebrous effect of pinhole camera pictures, but the commanding and heroic scale of murals.
Woodman´s photography has thus not a lot in common with mainstream art photography of the 1970s; neither with formalist modes privileged in art schools such as RISD (where Woodman studied) nor with the Bauhaus-derived experimentalism fostered by the Chicago Institute of Design.
But if Woodman´s photography does not factor readily into the art photographic mainstream, neither does it demonstrate any obvious resemblance to the photographic work now designated as postmodernist.(3) While Woodman regularly stresses the status of the photograph as representation, and often includes other representations within the field of the image, strategies of appropriation or direct quotation do not appear in her work. Reference to mass culture of to advertising is altogether absent. Woodman´s images, which are always staged, are intense and obsessional; the grim ironies or cool detachment of post-modern photographic practice are nowhere in evidence.
If Woodman´s photography recalls any other body of work, even superficially, it might be Surrealist photography.(4) But even granted her knowledge of such material, what is crucial is her deformation of it. Because if the body of the woman occupies a privileged place within Surrealist practice, it is essentially the body as imagined, feared, and desired by men. This, however, suggests the interesting possibility that Woodman envisaged her project as an enterprise of re-producing the image produced by men; looking with a woman´s eye and trying to reconstruct what a man sees. It is precisely this kind of description that leads away from Surrealism and art photography, and urges instead that the work be considered as it may have been informed by feminine, if not feminist, concerns. Thus, in seeking to “place” Francesca Woodman, it is perhaps most useful to ground a consideration of the work specifically in the terms it posits. Further, reading Woodman´s art through the prism of feminist thought – the philosophy of the Other – affords a perspective from which to consider her work with reference to the problems posed by the search for a feminist aesthetics or poetics. To have recognized the image of the woman´s body as “written” – an integral part of Woodman´s artistic accomplishment – is one thing; to learn to write it differently is another. In considering Woodman´s photography, with its Gothic undertones of extremity and excess, it is important to acknowledge that this initial act of radical perception is the necessary preamble to the emergence of a second act of exemplary transformation.
Running throughout the body of Woodman´s work are three central and overarching themes. First, and perhaps most compellingly, is Woodman´s staging of herself as the model for herself, the artist. In this alternating movement between active, creative subject – a producer of meaning – and passive object – a receiver of meaning – is metaphorically enacted the difficulty and paradox that attends the activity of the woman artist. Moreover, this seesaw of subject/object positions involves another set of relations; those of the artist and the model to the camera. Accordingly, Woodman´s work reckons with the camera as a third term in the construction of an elaborated coded femininity.
A second central theme in Woodman´s photography is the constant insistence on the woman´s body as both a sight (a spectacle) and a site (of meaning, desire, projection). Lastly, Woodman appears wholly to have grasped, and taken as the very substance of her work, the operations of fetishism as they are mobilized in the metamorphosis of female flesh into image. In choosing to assert rather than deny or avoid the fetish status of the woman´s body, Woodman´s photographs are vulnerable to the charge of collusion with those very operations. I will argue, however, that through strategies of defamiliarization and disruption – excess, displacement, dis-ordering – Woodman exposes the overdetermination of the body as signifier, thereby significantly altering the spectator´s relationship to it.
There is a sense in which all three of Woodman´s themes are integrally related, indivisibly bound. The youthful, beautiful Francesca Woodman experiences herself as the object of the gaze: magnet and locus of the desires and fantasies of others. And at the same time, as an artist, a photographer, she is the author of work that is specifically about the visual, the realm of the scopic. Her pictures, like those of any photographer, are produced by looking and arresting the look. The orchestration of these looks – those of the photographer, the camera, the spectator – function to produce different subject positions. Feminist film theory, using psychoanalytic theory as its tool, has interpreted these positions through the operation of sexual difference. (5) These looks, these subject positions, are accordingly understood as gendered. Thus, active looking – the mastering look of the photographer, the voyeuristic or fetishistic look of the spectator (whose position is mandated by the photographer´s and from which it cannot be separated) is understood as occupying a masculine position. In her alternating occupancy of the active position of artist/photographer and the passive position of object/model, Woodman´s activity raises many of the problems of feminine subjectivity and creativity, invoked, for example, in the question “what (if anything) changes when it is a woman who wields the camera?” Implicit in such a rhetorical query are others: Do women see differently, be it as artists or spectators? What contradictions are described when women assume what is posited as a masculine position? Is the act of looking or imaging, because active, inevitably a masculine position?(6)
In placing herself, her body, in front of the lens, Woodman does in fact collapse the distinction between seer and seen, subject of the gaze and object of it, artist and model. But far from producing any ideal synthesis, or surmounting the terms of these positions, occupying them both serves only to reassert their essential difference.
By electing to function as her own model, by casting herself as an image (for there is no attempt at portrait-like characterization or psychological delineation), Woodman was adapting to her purpose a device shared by artists as dissimilar as Cindy Sherman, Les Krims, and Hannah Wilke. As such a grouping indicates, this strategy can yield entirely different results, and be marshalled for wholly different purposes. Consequently, Woodman´s use of it needs to be critically perceived in the light of her other two overarching thematics. In staging her body in ways that appear deliberately calculated both to generate and emphasize what Laura Mulvey termed its “to-be-looked at-ness”(7), Woodman links the psychic objectification she deliberately and literally enacts (self becoming other) with the specular objectification (human being becoming image) inherent in photographic representations. Further, in furnishing her image-self, or its surrogate, with the paraphernalia of fetishism, (garter belts, boas, stockings, shells, eels, cala lilies, and so forth), Woodman constructs a metonymic chain that terminates in the imaged feminine body, presented to the spectator as itself the ur-fetish object. By way of example, we can consider nos. 4 and 5, which unambiguously adapt the conventional iconography of fetishism. The supine nude, stretched across a Victorian chaise-longue offers her body to the gaze of surveillance, mastery, and imaginary possession. Here is presented a staple of erotica, with a pedigree as exalted as the Rokeby Venus or as debased as a Playboy centerfold. But by girding the torso with three garter belts instead of one, by suspending superfluous stockings from the wall, Woodman creates a disturbance in the field. The fantasy tableau, the little theatre of the fetish, becomes deranged. Its familiar props, through a deceptively simple additive principle, now become strange and alienating. If a multiplication of phallic symbols signals castration fear, as Freud asserts, does not a multiplication of fetish paraphernalia evoke a comparable dread?
This interlocking network of fetishism and castration anxiety, as it constellates around the body of the woman, is frequently delineated in other of Woodman´s images. In a picture from the series I Stopped Playing the Piano, (Providence, c. 1977), no. 11 depicts a knife wielding woman, breast bared, a reptilian object cleaving to her chest. Another image in the series (Liza Used to Have Long Hair) confronts the viewer with a seated nude woman, cropped at the eyes, wisps and swatches of hair taped to her body. In another, the body of a nude is bisected by an inky swathe of fur boa, obscuring the sex it simultaneously invokes.
Lacan´s reminder that “images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman” is here apposite.(8) A photograph such as no. 16 from the series Three Kinds of Melon in Four Kinds of Light (Providence, c. 1975-77) reveals this imbrication with striking clarity and further illustrates the structural linkage of Woodman´s thematics. The conventional metaphorical relationship of breast and melon (woman´s body as fruit), and the metonymic relationship of part to whole (breast for woman), far from being unproblematically recapitulated, are complicated, tampered with, disturbed. The halved melons, offered like the breast to the spectator´s gaze, reveal their vagina-like interiors. But as the graphic representation of the split melon which covers one breast makes explicit, and as the actual melons suggest, inhabiting the very core of the feminine symbol, is the phallus. Recalling Freud´s definition of the fetish (“To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman´s (mother´s) phallus which the boy once believed in and does not wish to forego …”)(9), we should not be surprised to find it cropping up, so to speak, in the place of the feminine. For if we subscribe to the hypothesis that the desirable image of the woman contains a certain threat; that it provokes castration fears even as it functions to allay them, the appearance of the phallus in this cornucopia of the feminine signals what is fundamentally at stake in the dynamics of fetishism.
The insertion of a graphic representation of the melon in the photographic space of the real ones, and its placement over the woman´s breast, is especially suggestive. Such insertions figure prominently in Woodman´s oeuvre. Examples include the sequence of Charlie the Model (Providence, 1976-77), in which the subject displays a life drawing of himself superimposed over his own body, photographs such as Figs. 19 an 20 from the Swan Song series (Providence, 1978), or a photograph of three women, including Woodman, holding photographs of Woodman´s face in front of their own, with a fourth portrait taped to the wall. The placement of these other images en abyme – a type of internal mirroring or reiteration – serves to assert the textuality of the representations. In Woodman´s work this stress on the idea of textuality, so crucial in all contemporary theory, extends to the body of the woman itself. Similarly, this apprehension of the woman and her body as blank page, as tabula rasa, as a surface on which meaning is inscribed is a pervasive theme in feminist theory, and a recurring motif in women´s writing. (10) It serves to underscore, moreover, the recognition that patriarchy constructs the woman as bearer, rather than maker of meaning.
A sequence of images from which nos. 17 and 18 are excerpted (Providence, 1976-77) is a virtual paradigm of this operation. The blank page – here a roll of white seamless – is placed frontally in the path of the spectator´s gaze, with Woodman positioned alongside it, but off center and looking off to the side. Other images in the series depict Woodman marking and cutting the paper; two slits inscribed in penciled circles. From these openings, in increasing number, erupt leafy, vegetal forms. That these “natural” effusions spring from the paper, marked and designated to connote female genitalia, displaces the feminine from the woman to the page, from referent back to signifier, from the biological to the textual.
Similar tropes can be found throughout Woodman´s work. In no. 22, for example, the headless nude torso is kneaded by the hands into an unmistakable parody of a face. The body´s placement in front of a charcoal drawing of chairs and an unidentifiable thigh-like shape establishes, yet again, the staus of both as representation. The drawing, however, produces a specific associative chain: artist´s studio, the model, even perhaps the chair the model might be seated in. Unlike, however, the artist´s model of tradition, Woodman´s model assumes an aggressive, assaultive – a monstrous – incarnation. The scandal of Woodman´s torso has less to do with the leering menace of the face, than the suggestion that eyes and mouth are no less sexual than breasts and genitals; desire or fear is in the looking. The psychic space of vision – the domain of the scopic – is itself informed by sexual drives (voyeurism, exhibitionism and fetishism all hinge on the agency of the look). Woodman´s mutations and deformations of the body, whether extreme of subtle, call attention to the erotic underpinnings of the look.
In no. 21 (Providence, 1976 – 77), part of the same series, the crude white mask, placed at the woman´s sex, summons the head of Medusa, whose frightfulness Freud designates as “a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something.”(11) Denied that sight, the spectator is instead directed to its surrogate, one that conjures up a death mask as well. What then is the effect of such an image on the woman spectator, who presumably cannot lose what she never had?
The difficulty in formulating an answer to such a question is not specific to this particular photograph in which the iconography and organization literally reproduces a metaphoric configuration and materially presents what is typically displaced, sublimated, or repressed. Much of Woodman´s work in fact appears to flaunt, with a vengence, those accoutrements immediately recognizable as belonging to the purview of the fetish. As a female spectator, my own reading of such images consequently hinges on the recognition of their overdetermination, which like strategies of mimicry, signals a gap or distance in the very act of reiteration. But this is not to be confused with parody of with a related strategy of masquerade. Ultimately, the power of Woodman´s photographs lies not in wresting new meanings from the lexicon of fetishism (much less redeeming them), but rather, in re-presenting that very lexicon in ways that effectively block its automatic consumption and acceptance. It would seem reasonable to assume that these blocking operations function differently for male and female spectators, insofar as we ascribe sexual difference in looking. Whether the gaze at the body provoked by Woodman´s pictures in inflected narcissistically, voyeuristically, of fetishistically, the nature of that look must inevitably determine the meaning imputed to it.
Overall, Woodman´s variations on both the construction and inscription of femininity do not stake out an identifiable position for either the male or female spectator. Arguably, it is precisely this ambiguity, the indeterminacy of subject and viewing positions, that charges Woodman´s photographs with their unsettling admixture of seductiveness and affront. This ambiguity of address seems particulary apparent in the great mass of Woodman´s images that elaborate on that most venerable and recurrent topos, the conflation of the woman and her body with nature.
Consistent with her literalizing strategies that make manifest the latent dynamics of fetishism, Woodman renders the forms of this association explicit. A suite of images, no. 12 (MacDowell, Summer 1980), traces a successive slippage whereby the woman becomes progressively absorbed into the natural landscape with which she is mythically identified. The rolled birch bark clasped in one shot encases both of Woodman´s arms in another. In a subsequent member of the series, the Daphne-like metamorphosis is accelerated; situated within the birch grove, the white verticals of the woman´s raised arms become visually meshed with the trees. Similarly, in another member of the series, the woman´s outstretched arm describes a boundary in which the real natural world – the conifers bordering the lake – and a “natural” simulation – the ferns that mimic their reflection – are optically joined. What might otherwise be perceived as merely a playful trompe l´oeil effect in photography is given an altogether different inflection by the use of the woman´s body as a locus for this visual confusion. The familiarity and ubiquity of the conceptual collapse of woman into nature is here effectively bracketed, stalled, even short-circuited through the subtle suggestion of the nightmare facet of metamorphosis.
It is interesting in this context to compare a recent work such as Barbara Kruger´s We Won´t Play Nature to Your Culture to Woodman´s approach. (12) Kruger´s confrontational address, effected both linguistically and formally, contributes to the construction of the work as an unambiguous act of radical refusal. Kruger´s attempt to direct her work to a female spectator operates along the trajectory of language. We (women) refuse this relationship. Spectators are thus automatically differentiated and distinguished through the mode of address that constructs a feminine us and a masculine them. The purpose of Kruger´s choice of purloined image – the woman´s face with blinded, leaf-covered eyes – is to signify visually the implications of this putative relationship, characterized as both lethal and blinding. In contrast to Kruger´s unmistakable stance, Woodman´s production in general stages no act of defiant or militant negation, provides no guideposts for an alternate, meliorative construction, indicates no privileged space for the female spectator. Instead, Woodman relentlessly offers up the archetypal allusions, mythologies, emblems, and symbols adhering to the feminine, and infuses them – charges them – with dread, with dis-ease.
Woodman´s art is thus a troubling and troubled one. Ridden with menace, its lapidary beauty and elegance serve to function as a kind of lure. Nowhere is this clearer than in the numerous series that enact tableaux of entrapment, engulfment, or absorption of the woman in those spaces – both literal and metaphorical – to which she is conventionally relegated. In the Space2 sequence (Providence, c. 1975-76), for example, no.1 depicts the body in, on, and around a glass museum display case. Here, the reified condition of the feminine as aestheticized object is made utterly explicit, as are the stakes. Variations on this theme include one in which the case contains an animal skull, another in which the corpse-like body of the model spills out of a Natural History display cabinet filled with stuffed specimens, birds, a racoon.
It is perhaps the House series (Providence, c. 1975-77) where the Gothic aspect of Woodman´s work is most apparent. In photographs such as nos. 23, 24, 26, the woman´s body is physically devoured by the house. As in Olive Schreiner´s The Yellow Wallpaper, the space of woman´s seclusion and worldly exclusion not only imprisons, but consumes. Swallowed by the fireplace, layered over by the wallpaper, effaced, occulted, Woodman presents herself as the living sacrifice to the domus. The extremity and violence of these photographs are matched only by a grouping in which the woman´s body is defaced – by dirt, by paint, by rubbish – and identified with the scabrous walls and corners against which she is impressed. The desecration of the woman´s body that such images enact are tempered by the recognition that this is, after all, the flip side of its idealization. Woodman´s linking of the woman´s body to the walls and surfaces it seems bonded to repeat the theme of the body as itself a surface. The marking of this body in patriarchal culture, its incarnation as sign, is given a chilling embodiment when Woodman marks it in ways that conjure the impulse to debase and violate which parallels the impulse to worship and adore.
If the House photographs function on the register of nightmare, the astonishing blueprint works are conceived in the less charged modality of the oneiric. Thematically, they elaborate on ideas and motifs that surface regularly in Woodman´s work; the “found” morphological and formal resemblances between nature and culture, the animate and inanimate. Here as always, the image of woman is central insofar as it is her body that becomes the dictionary of form to which all others are metaphorically or metonymically linked. In one of these works, however, the figure of the woman is abolished, although the presence of masculine and feminine signifiers is nonetheless established. The triptych to which I refer, the 14 foot long Bridges and Tiaras is somewhat exceptional in the sense that it is constructed of existing representations; a schematic rendering of an 18th century bridge design, a filigree-work tiara, and a modern bridge. The three images, enlarged to the same grandiose scale, visually assert a condition of equivalence. Thus the decorative ornament, quintessence of the feminine, is both the center image of the triptych, but more crucially, is presented in such a way as to insist on its equal importance. The masculine accomplishment of engineering and large-scale construction is similarly depicted as subject to gendered readings; the 18th century bridge appearing far more “feminine” than its industrial successor. This relativizing of masculinity and femininity is comparitively rare in Woodman´s work where the emphasis is put so emphatically on the cultural and aesthetic construction of femininity. Nonetheless, throughout her work there surface occasional explorations of sexual ambiguity or indeterminacy. This is manifest in suites of her images where sexual codes collide, where the boundaries and certainties of sexual difference are placed in unresolved play.
Reflecting on the range of Woodman´s production in its entirety, I am struck by its encyclopedic recapitulation of the images and symbols of and for the woman. But perhaps even more impressively, it is the more inchoate notion of the attributes that are, in Bob Dylan´s phrase, “just like a woman” that Woodman´s work manages to disturb and denaturalize.
Consider, for example, the tradition of iconographic coupling of the woman (or the goddess) with the mirror. As an attribute of vanity, or in our post-Freudian age – narcissism – to which women are legendarily thought to be excessively prey, the mirror comes to connote femininity in a manner altogether self-evident. In Woodman´s frequent use of mirrors, when they reflect the woman at all, what is produced is simply another image. Hence, the relationship constructed is not between the real woman and her image, but between the spectator and two equally unreal images. What the mirror reflects, or fails to reflect, is always thrown back on the spectator. Reading vanity, or narcissism, into the image is revealed, precisely, as an interpretive – and thus projective – act. This seems to me to be at once the strength and the limit of Woodman´s art. A feminine poetics or aesthetics must by definition presume the existence of a feminine subject whose perception, vision, and creativity is formed through and by her femininity. But if we acknowledge, as Woodman surely did, that femininity is a discursive construction, a social category, a constraining and psychically destructive process imposed from without and painfully internalized within, a condition, moreover, defined by its alienation, how is that femininity to be authentically construed? Where, in short, do we locate and ground this femininity apart from the patriarchal structures that “speak” it?
Alternatively, a feminist poetics or aesthetics tends to be far more tentative in its assumption of the mantle of femininity. The philosophy of the Other engenders a politics of the Other, and a feminist aesthetics must draw its mandate from both (13). A feminist aesthetics can assume no given feminine; can only do its work by dislodging or intervening in the operations that have historically defined and imposed it.
Not the least part of the great accomplishment represented by the artistic legacy of Francesca Woodman is the way it both urgently and eloquently poses these complex issues of relationship between the definition of the feminine and the theories of the feminist. The identifications and projections the work summons or denies are inextricably joined to the investigation of both. The tragedy of Woodman´s death is a fact and a given, but the work she produced is a living testimonial, a valuable bequest to other women. Its gravity and its extremity is a legacy of painful knowledge, but its sensuous beauty and dreamlike allusiveness assert, after all, the strength of the will, the pleasure of its maker. Alienated from language, from culture, from image, from body, the woman artist nonetheless manages to speak.
Notes
1
Cited in Jonathon Culler, On Deconstruction, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982, p.23.
2
A clear and thorough discussion of the relationship between still photography and the operations of fetishism can be found in Victor Burgin, “Photography, Phantasy, Function” and “Looking at Photographs,” both anthologized in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, The Macmillan Press, London, 1983. See also Craig Owen´s essay “Posing” in the exhibition catalogue Difference, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1985; and Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish”, October 34 (Fall 1985).
3
A more detailed discussion of the important differences between art photography derived from modernist aesthetics and postmodernist practices that employ photography can be found in several of my essays. See “Playing in the Fields of Image,” Afterimage (Summer, 1982); “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art, Photography and Postmodernism,” Screen, XXV, no 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1984); and “Photography After Art Photography,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking, Representation, ed. and with an introduction by Brian Wallis, David R. Godine, Inc., Boston, 1985.
4
Certain correspondences or similarities that one might note between Surrealist photographs and Woodman´s work are most likely fortuitous. The great majority of the former were until recently unpublished, (except for those that had appeared in their original Surrealist publications), unreproduced, and very little known. See in this regard Rosalind Krauss, L´Amour Fou, Abbeville Press, New York, 1985. Woodman´s friendship in New York with Timothy Baum, collector of Surrealist art, exposed her, however, to some of this material.
5
The bibliography of articles dealing with what we might term the problematics of the look is (significantly) both recent and extensive. Much of the critical discussion has been generated by feminist film theory. A partial listing of major essays would include the now classic text of Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Wallis, op.cit.; Constance Penley, “A Certain Refusal of Difference”: Feminist Film Theory” in Wallis, op.cit.; Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade – Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in Screen, XXV, no 3-4, (Sept-Oct. 1982); Mary Ann Doane, “Woman´s Stake: Filming the Female Body,” October 17 , (Summer 1981). For a more general discussion see Annette Kuhn, Women´s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982; and E. Ann Kaplan, Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera, Methuen, London and New York, 1983. The British journal M/F and the American one, Camera Obscura, have consistently explored these issues.
6
See Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” op.cit.
7
See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” op.cit.
8
Jacques Lacan, “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” in Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. and with introductory essays by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. by Jacqueline Rose, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1983, p.90.
9
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. and with an introduction by Philip Rieff, Collier Books, New York, 1963, p.215.
10
See, for example, Susan Gubar, “The Blank Page,” The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, Pantheon, New York, 1985; for a detailed discussion of a notorious text in which the woman´s body is understood as wholly written, see Katja Silverman, “Histoire d´O: The Construction of a Female Subject,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1984.
11
Sigmund Freud, “Medusa´s Head,” in Rieff, op.cit., p.212
12
image Barbara Kruger, We won´t play nature to your culture.
13
Here again, the bibliography in quite substantial. Some relevant essays include: Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, “Textual Strategies – The Politics of Art Making.” Screen, XXI, no 2 (Summer 1980); Silvia Bovenschen, “Is there a Feminine Aesthetic?” trans. by Beth Weckmueller, New German Critique, no. 10, (Winter 1977); Teresa de Lauretis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women´s Cinema,” New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985); Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Members of Workshop 9, “For the Etruscans: Sexual Difference and Artistic Production – The Debatte Over a Female Aesthetic,” in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1980